2023-July Snapshot Notes

[rowanseymour]

Hey everyone! 8.2 is now the official stable release and we've updated the recommended versions of all components in the README. This is the second release under a BSL licence - if that doesn't work for you then you are welcome to continue with the AGPL version which gets all these updates after a delay.

This release will be the last to support external ticketing services as the internal ticketing support is maturing and where we'd like to focus our time and energy.

New Features

• Complete rework of the ticket view UI to show contact information and fields and make it easier to assign tickets.
• Contact fields can be selectively made viewable, editable or hidden to agent users.
• Tickets now viewable by topic and topic can be edited from the UI.
• Easier to add Twilio, Vonage and Plivo numbers from different accounts, and update credentials for multiple channels associated with the same account.
• Broadcasts now have the same support for queries and exclusions as flow starts, and have a preview of how many contacts will receive it.
• Contact chatbox, ticket reply box, Send To Somebody else flow action all now support media attachments.
• Messages API endpoint now supports POST to create and send a single message which is more efficient than creating a broadcast for a single contact.
• New calls list page shows all IVR calls.
• Channel logs now written to storage (i.e. S3) instead of the database provided they have an associated message or call.
• Contacts that are blocked, stopped or archived can be exported and imported.
• Flow imports are now asynchronous so can take longer than the server timeout.
• Triggers can now be deleted individually or in bulk.
• New task to interrupt sessions after 90 days and ensure runs can be archived.
• Workspace suspension now creates an incident which will notify workspace administrators by email.
• New MTN channel type.
• Contact locking used when modifying contacts thru the UI to reduce changes of database deadlocks.

Bug Fixes

• Channel log types fixed when channel interaction results in an error.
• De-duping of incoming messages fixed to not ignore multiple incoming messages with just attachments.
• Fix workspace deletion task.
• Fix timeout between mailroom and courier when fetching large attachments.

Other Changes

• Old user interface completely removed.
• Almost all database triggers to maintain counts have been rewritten to work at statement level instead of row level and thus be more efficient.
• No more base as a flow language - every flow has a valid ISO 639-3 language code.

Deployment Notes

RapidPro

• BRANDS setting is now just a single brand object called BRAND, and there is no longer a DEFAULT_BRAND setting.
• DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE, AWS_DEFAULT_ACL, AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME, AWS_BUCKET_DOMAIN and ARCHIVE_BUCKET settings replaced by new Django 4.2 STORAGES setting. Use this to configure S3 compatible storage buckets for archives, logs etc.
• REDIS_HOST, REDIS_PORT and REDIS_DB settings no longer used - you should configure the CACHES and CELERY_BROKER_URL settings directly.
• RETENTION_PERIODS no longer includes flowstart - these are now deleted by archiver when deleting runs, instead of in a celery task.

Mailroom

• S3_SESSION_BUCKET setting replaced by S3_SESSIONS_BUCKET, and S3_SESSION_PREFIX no longer supported.
• S3_ATTACHMENTS_PREFIX should not start with a slash - previously this was required but then stripped off before uploading to S3.

Courier

• S3_ATTACHMENTS_PREFIX should not start with a slash - previously this was required but then stripped off before uploading to S3.